Trump Administration
Floor Speech
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Mrs. MURRAY. I thank the Senator from Oregon.
First, let me just commend you for what you are doing here throughout the night, throughout today, calling attention to a really critical issue in this country.
So many people have come up to me, you know, because we go back and forth to the west coast all the time--how many people walk up to us and say: What can I do about this? And each one of us has to say: Here is what I can do.
I want to thank you for doing what you are doing today because you are going above and beyond to point out to people that, as your chart says, authoritarianism is here, and it is here now. We can ignore it, or we can speak out.
You have spent all night long and all day standing on your feet at, I am sure, great personal sacrifice to fight for everyone in this country and to sound the alarms, as you have been talking about. So I just personally want to thank you.
I want to reiterate something that you have said for all of these hours and, actually, many times to me over the past few months--the fact that Trump is using his place in government to control every aspect of our lives, whether it is what our schools are teaching or not teaching; it is whether or not he is prosecuting his enemies, which he is doing; it is cutting off projects and funding to punish the political opposition.
You and I both know--we represent blue States, but we have a lot of red counties and cities and neighborhoods. Even within all of our blue districts--you can't just randomly say ``I am hurting blue'' without hurting the red because these are all Americans. But he is using his power to do that.
We are seeing him, as you know well in your home State, deploying troops to intimidate Democrats. I listened to you late last night talk about what is happening in Portland. The misuse of this kind of power should be frightening to every single American. We need to stand up, and we need to call it out, which is what you are doing today. Even dictating what late night TV hosts are doing is part of this whole picture that you have been describing.
But I came to the floor today as your partner on the Appropriations Committee. We serve on that together. We all know in this body how important that committee is because we decide where the funding is going to go in the country.
I have been out on this floor, I have been at home, and I have been everywhere talking about the power of the purse, which sounds kind of like this quaint little phrase, but it is really important. For anybody who has a family, you know that the person who writes the checks in the checkbook decides where the money is going to go. Well, that power of the checkbook--that power of the purse, as it is called--lands on this side of the White House and the Congress. We have the power of the purse. Why is that? Because we represent our constituents from across the country--I, from Washington State; you, from Oregon. People from Illinois and Alabama and Florida all come here to be a voice for their constituents on where their tax dollars are going to go.
Within this country, the power of the purse means we have the ability to decide where the money is going to go because we represent our constituents. That is what they call on us to do.
I am seeing Trump do an all-out assault on Congress's power of the purse, so I wanted to come here today and ask you your thoughts on how this President is undermining the power of the purse and how it plays into your ringing the bells about authoritarianism.
Ringing the alarm bells for the authoritarian takeover.
The power of the purse is one of those fundamental ways that, in fact, the President is concentrating his power.
The difference between a democracy is that--in a democracy, the legislature says: Here are the programs, here is how we want to run them, and here is how we are going to fund them. It brings together the collective wisdom of a large group that comes from every portion of the Nation, like we do here--100 Senators from 50 States. We not only bring our geographic differences; we bring our life differences and our life skills. All of that helps us form a pretty complex set of decisions about the programs that need more support because of the challenges we are facing as a nation at that moment and those that can do with less support. That is our responsibility. But all those voices together are just so central to that.
In an authoritarian nation, all of that responsibility--design the program, fund the program, choose whether the program will live or die--is all transferred to the executive. So we are thinking, authoritarianism is over here, and the power of the purse is with the executive; democracy is over here, and the power of the purse is with legislature.
Russell Vought, the current head of OMB, is a well-trained, clever man, and he is saying: Well, let's see how we can actually take the power of the purse. You passed a bill for fiscal year 2025, and now we are in--we are no longer in fiscal, but let's say we were. Well, maybe I can just slow-walk the funds for the programs I don't want to fund. That way, the decision is transferred to the Executive. Maybe I can freeze them. Maybe I can impound them, basically permanently take them off the table, see if I can get away with that. Maybe I can send over a request to have Congress formally undo the programs they have funded.
They did send one of those over, and it was voted on. It needed a majority vote in both Chambers. But the problem with that is you have a bipartisan vision to serve the entire--these desks to me are now representing the geography of the United States--to serve the entire breadth and depth of our Nation, with all of our differences. Then, on a partisan basis, meaning half the room, they decide what programs to cut. That means a deal was done in the beginning between Democrats and Republicans, and then it was undone. The programs that were cut were the programs, by and large, the Democrats had advocated for. How do you do the next deal in that situation?
Then we have Mr. Vought saying: What I will do is pretend I am going to spend it, but then in the last 45 days, I will send a notification that I would like Congress to undo it. But there is a waiting period, so therefore I know what I have done is set it up so that before those 45 days are up, the end of the fiscal year comes, and that bucket that goes to that program goes poof into thin air.
That is the fancy term that is used, ``pocket rescission.''
So here we are saying to our Republican colleagues: If you negotiated in good faith to serve the interests and concerns that all hundred Senators bring here, than a bill forged in that bipartisan manner can only be done in a bipartisan manner.
We do rescissions in a bipartisan manner. We do undo funding. We take 1-year, 2-year, 3-year funding that turned out not to be needed or better spent elsewhere, and we pull it back, and we put it into a different program. But we do that readjustment in the same bipartisan way we did the initial program.
We are saying to our colleagues across the aisle, if the power of the purse means something--and it does: the difference between an authoritarian government and a democracy--then work with us to defend our Constitution, defend that what we have done together cannot be undone by the Executive.
So far, we have not received a ``Yes, we will defend the Constitution.'' What I hear is mainly ``Yeah, President Trump would never go for that.'' When you hear that, you know you are trapped in authoritarianism because the vision of our Nation is that we the Congress will forge these programs and decide how to fund them, how much. And when it is like ``Can't do that because Trump would be upset,'' well, that just confirms that we are in authoritarianism now. And it is not just the power of the purse, of course; it is an attack on due process; it is an attack on free press; it is an attack on freedom of speech; it is the weaponization of the Department of Justice; it is the ignoring the laws that apply to the Executive completely, like firing all of the IGs and getting rid of all of the referees.
In the book that I really spent the night trying to use as a framework in order to say, hey, experts have studied how democracies die--they don't die with people with guns anymore; they die with people who get elected, and then they follow the authoritarian playbook on how to basically undo the checks and balances and amplify the power.
And another piece of that, that we should be very concerned about in the Northwest right now--more in Portland, but who knows what happens in Seattle--is trying to carve a path in which Trump has court rescissions that say he can put troops into the street whenever he wants. And that is a massively dangerous amplification of authoritarian power, and that is why what we do this year makes such a difference.
And we have to protest and say this is not normal. We have to ring the alarm bells. We have to praise the 7 million people who got out there and said: No Kings in the United States. And that is such a beautiful, short way of saying: No authoritarianism; we want our Republic back, and we are going to fight to make that happen.
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Mrs. MURRAY. And we want our voices to be heard. That is what you are doing, and I thank the Senator from Oregon for all he has been doing for so long, for so many years, but especially for the last 20-plus hours that you have been on the floor--
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Mrs. MURRAY.--too many hours on the floor, reminding us all of why this is so critical.
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